The Fugs: Troubadours of the First Amendment

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the seminal sixties rock band The Fugs. Today happens to be the birthday of one of its two main founders Ed Sanders (b. 1939) and we just passed the 100th birthday of the other one Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010). Once mentioned in the same breath as all the biggest sixties rock groups, The Fugs’ legend could do with a little signal amplification at the moment, I fear. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than chiming in, and giving copious credit where copious credit is due.

Why have they been forgotten? My theory (and it’s so obvious that it has to be true) is that, due to the often profane and scatological nature of their lyrics, The Fugs never got played on the radio. Some brave college DJs or whatever may have spun their disks from time to time, but they received nothing like the Chinese Water Torture of incessant air play that officially sanctioned commercial groups traditionally get. Additionally, in their original incarnation they were only together for five years. And they didn’t play Monterey Pop or Woodstock or any of the similar big concerts that were memorialized on film. There’s just a handful of records, and the occasional admiring mention by their contemporaries.

Thus the only way someone who wasn’t there in the sixties would learn about The Fugs after their years of notoriety would be to read about them in books written by rock critics or the like, or maybe by word of mouth. Yet, they were pivotal. Even more than the Velvet Underground they were the ultimate pre-punk New York rock band, and I hasten to interject that they paved the way for punk. Like Lou Reed, Sanders and Kupferberg were poets before, during, and after their songwriting careers, and this is a key distinction between them and the other groups of their day. They weren’t kids thrashing around making noise in the family’s basement. Indeed, Kupferberg was over 40 when the band formed, possibly the oldest rock and roller to make a major debut at that or any time.

They were connected to the Beats. Allen Ginsberg actually mentioned Kupferberg in Howl. In the poem, he wrote of someone who (like Steve Brodie, Robert Emmet Odlum, and Larry Donovan) had jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. In reality it had been the Manhattan Bridge in Kupferberg’s case, but it just made sense to fold his stunt into existing New York folklore. He had performed this stunt in 1944, and broke several bones in the process.

Anyway it’s taken me over a quarter of a century of time on the ground in the Lower East Side arts scene to really appreciate what The Fugs were all about, and what their significance was and is. Theater for the New City and LaMama, both places where I’ve spent a lot of time, kept the candle of the glory years going well into the new century. When I first started working at TNC there was still an anarchist book store in their lobby, and Kupferberg was still performing his poetry annually in their Lower East Side Festival of the Arts. The Fugs came along when that neighborhood and the entire downtown area was a hotbed of artistic ferment: with beat poetry, the folk music revival, be bop, Off-Off Broadway theatre, and underground cinema, all swirling around and influencing each other at the same time.

Kupferberg was a native New Yorker, who’d grown up in a Yiddish speaking household and attended Brooklyn College. He’d put out his own ‘zineBirth as early as 1958. He followed it up with another one Yeah, which ran from 1961 to 1965. And he published scores of poetry books. The much younger Sanders was a midwesterner from Kansas City, from the sort of stock that embraced the folk music scene over on the other side of Washington Square Park. He graduated from NYU with a degree in Greek, an incredibly useful language for a poet. In 1961 he was busted for attending an anti-nuke protest and the resulting “Poem from Jail” gained some attention. In 1962 he started his own ‘zine: Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts, which Sanders wrote was “Dedicated to Pacifism, Unilateral Disarmament, National Defense thru Nonviolent Resistance, Multilateral Indiscriminate Apertural Conjugation, Anarchism, World Federalism, Civil Disobedience, Obstructers & Submarine Boarders, and All Those Groped by J. Edgar Hoover in the Silent Halls of Congress.”

The tone of that pronouncement reflects the tone of the lyrics of The Fugs. I think I read somewhere that Sanders and Kupferberg met at Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore, founded in 1963 near Kupferberg’s apartment building. It was originally on Avenue A, and then moved to East 10th Street until Sanders closed it in 1970. These guys were natural collaborators. Their name of course is taken from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead,and it’s impossible not to find significance that the word it euphemizes is also part of the name of the ‘zine. The third key member of the group was Texas-born Ken Weaver (b. 1940) who was responsible for songs like “I Couldn’t Get High” and “Slum Goddess”. In their original incarnation, they were joined by two members of The Holy Modal Rounders (a group that had also collaborated with Sam Shepard), Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel.

Later however the membership of the group beyond the core trio constantly shifted in a manner that presages John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, i.e., “anyone who is in the room at the time”. This is not the only way The Fugs influenced Lennon, I think. The Fugs were the first rock group who were vocal and constant peace activists, as well as one of the first to make humor and satire a major component of what they did. And when The Beatles broke up, where did Lennon hang out? The Lower East Side, with the likes of David Peel, and former Fugs co-conspirators Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (we’ll return to that). If Lennon had collaborated with The Fugs, I bet he’d have made a more interesting and entertaining album than Some Time in New York City.

The Fugs also knew Frank Zappa of The Mothers, and there are aspects of their boundary-pushing senses of humor which the two groups had in common. But not musically. I’m not sure ANYONE was influenced by The Fugs musically. They were basically a garage band, very raw, very crude, the music indifferently (or very loosely) performed, although they got better over time. Occasionally they would veer off into a direction that aped the blues, or country music, or some other style, like Gregorian chants or Renaissance rounds, usually for the purposes of parody. But often with lyrics adapted from Blake, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold! Kupferberg’s “Carpe Diem” channels a poetic perennial stretching all the way back to Horace. But he also penned immediately digestible political numbers like “Kill for Peace” and “CIA Man”. A lot of the group’s material was about sex and drugs, another reason both record labels and radio stations were wary of them, in spite of their popularity as live entertainers. And they were doing this LONG before everyone else. YEARS. Some folk artists went there, yes. But rock bands? Which back then were ostensibly looking to appeal to bubble-headed American teenagers who just wanted to dance? The Fugs weren’t booked on Shindig.

In 1966 Sanders was arrested and his bookstore shut down over obscenity charges, which he beat with the backing of the ACLU. This resulted in his appearing on the cover of Life magazine, raising the band’s profile.

In October 1967, The Fugs collaborated with the Yippies (Hoffman, Rubin et al) and The Diggers in their stunt to “levitate the Pentagon” to protest the Vietnam War. It is Sanders who began to chant, “out, demons, out!” in an effort to exorcize whatever evil spirits inhabited the place.

Like the Velvet Underground, The Fugs broke up just after releasing their most polished album, 1969’s The Belle of Avenue A. Sanders went solo, reportedly discouraged by the events of recent months: the assassinations, the riots, the circus at the Democratic National Convention, Nixon’s electoral victory, and no end of the war in sight. In 1971 he wrote The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, a terrific, even necessary counterpoint to Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, and one one of the primary resources for my rock musical Willy Nilly. Sanders actually did tons of original investigative reporting, attending the Manson Family trials, and interviewing lots of people overlooked by other sources. He continued down this path. In 1976 he wrote a book called Investigative Poetry, and then followed it up by writing a LOT of poetry inspired by history and current events. He also continued to release numerous solo albums.

Meanwhile, Kupferberg appeared in the movies W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971, about Wilhelm Reich); Dynamite Chicken (1971), and Voulez-vous coucher avec God? (1972). And wrote scores of books of poetry.

In 1984, The Fugs reformed and have reunited in various permutations many times over the years since. By then, punk and ‘zines, both of which Sanders and Kupferberg had very much pioneered, were well on the way to joining sixties radicalism in the annals of history. But it’s important to know where and when and by whom the seeds were planted. In 2011, Sanders very intelligently wrote An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side, because as we all know, history belongs to those who tell it. And if you can tell it in verse, why, then you’re Homer.